When Latin's word order drives you batty

Latin's got a well deserved reputation among English speakers for having a complex word order. I can't argue that it isn't complex from an English point of view. But I'm going to throw out this bit of English song. (If you know the source, fine. But no Google if you don't!)

You can fix this fixer-upper
Up with a little bit of love!

What's going on with the verb fix up? It's been split up with the determiner phrase this fixer-upper, which in turn is derived from the verb it is splitting. 

To make the matter more tangled, there are patients in -er. For example: My wife is a keeper. But keep is hardly a phrasal verb. In deverbal agent in -er, like bricklayer, there's only one -er added to indicate that the word is a noun. But fixer-upper? Both morphemes in fix up get the -er.

English, what's wrong with you? How could you put linguistically complex stuff like this in a kids' movie like Frozen? 

"I was never good in English.”

So said Andrew Shaw after he let slip with a profanity on live television.

It was a great shot, a great setup … [Bleeping] … It was unbelievable. All the guys, we deserved it.

How could he help himself? He scored the tie-breaking goal in a thriller of a hockey game—triple overtime in the finals. I don't know about you, but I'd be a little emotional and prone to let something slip too. In an interview a little later he was asked about what he said.

Slip of the tongue. I couldn’t think at all, actually. Could barely breathe. I think I made up a word in there, too, actually.

All of that is completely understandable. It happens to us all, but then he said something else.

I was never good in English.

As far as I can tell, Shaw is a native English speaker, so there's no reason he shouldn't be good at English. Nor is there anything particularly unusual about the comment. I've heard similar sentiments often enough. Setting aside written English, I wonder how many people feel that way about themselves? It's no wonder they do. You can find a powerpoint about this topic here (it gets specific to English on page 19 and the meat of the matter on page 28).

My point is this: as a native speaker, your language use is fine. Your tongue may slip on occasion. But on the whole, you're fine. And if it isn't? Then we better let the cardinals in Maine know about how poorly they sing their song. They don't sing it the same as cardinals in Illinois, where cardinals are the state bird and would know the official song.

Edit to add: As a Chicagoan, I feel I should say something like, "Go 'Hawks!" So, here it is. Go 'Hawks!

All of Shaw's quotes are taken from this Yahoo Sports article.

Noun incorporation in English?

No less than F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

But first some explanation. Just what am I talking about? Consider this word:

dogwalker

It describes a person who walks dogs. The key is that in English we don't care if there are twelve dogs, three dogs or just one. The exact dogs being walked don't matter. You would never say something like this:

*dogswalker

This word isn't any good in English. It wants to make a distinction we don't want to make. It's not that you could go for this form optionally. In fact, it would seem to imply that there are specific dogs being walked in both cases, but we don't want that in English. It's good enough to be generic. Now, it turns out that there are some languages that allow for that—Mohawk for one. You can take the verb's object and glom it onto the verb. You keep the same meaning as if you hadn't. It's called noun incorporation since the verb incorporates the noun into itself.

And it's not normally a feature of English, so you cannot imagine how surprised I was to see Fitzgerald say this:

…the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home…

Now I don't actually think Fitzgerald was doing this to prove a point. I don't even know that he knew what he was doing, though it must have been on purpose. It's too weird to not be on purpose. He's violating a real rule in English grammar. It leapt off the page for me, so I'd not be surprised to hear it did the same while editors were having their way with the text. Likewise, I'm sure the printers noticed to as they were making plates. It's just weird, but there it is.

Fitzgerald has glommed a plural object (men) onto the verb (carrying). Oh, sure, there's a hyphen there, but it almost serves to underline the weird usage.

In case you don't believe me, here's the page the quote is taken from.

Creeping ergativity in English

Once again, I heard Rick Kogan on the radio. It's like a habit or something. Anyway, one of his guests said something like this (and I wish I could remember the exact quote, but it was like this).

Both me and her went to work.

I'm going to guess that in reading you wanted to * this. And indeed, if it hadn't been "me and her" this would pass muster. Tense is right. General arrangement of constituents is right. Case marking on the pronouns is wrong. Or is it? Here are some more examples.

*Me went to work.
*Her went to work.

I would bet that even the radio guest would reject that. I also suspect that this would be considered wrong too.

*Us went to work.

I also seriously doubt that this would pass muster too.

*Me and him saw the dog.

EDIT: Or maybe it would in non-standard varieties of English. Now that I think of it, I can't think of a situation where "me and him" is so outrageously wrong that you can't use it. So much for the notion of ergativity in English. Because…

But here my lack of corpus fails me, and I don't have a recent speech example. I'm not even sure that my native-speaker intuition will help me here. I wish it did. I'd love to be able to show that this is ergativity creeping in to English.

It looks like it is sensitive to pronouns, which would be the only place Ergativity could rear its head in English anyway, but not any old pronouns. It looks like it needs to be a compound subject with a first or third person (probably singular) in one of the subject slots. I also have a strong suspicion that it is sensitive to conjunctions.

Throw this into the just another thesis idea category.

Greek compounds and English phrasals

I'm working my way through Lucain's True Story and the realization is hitting me again. Ancient Greek and English have some odd ways that they are alike. The biggest to me is in how compound verbs are interpreted. (And I'm sure as soon as I hit publish, I'll realize otherwise.)

I should be clear. The morphology of the verbs are completely unalike. English is virtually inflection free, whereas Greek has inflections for person and number that are much more like Latin. But the interpretation of the compound is more likely to be transparent to English speakers than Latin compounds. For example:

καταγράφω – I write on

The morphology breaks down like this:

/kata.grap^h.o:/
κατα.γράφ.ω
against.write.I

Ok, so maybe I'm cherry-picking a definition for κατα. But there are more. I'll divide the morphemes up with dots like I did above—they are in the same order.

περι.πλέκ.ω – I fold around
ἐπι.σκοπέ.ω – I look at

In most cases, the Greek compound fits more or less with its English phrasal counterpart. This is completely at odds with Latin. Latin forms its compounds exactly like Greek. Preposition + verb root + person/number inflection.

pro.mitt.o – I send for?
in.veni.o – I come into?
con.st.o – I stand with?

No, promise, find and agree (though that last one kind of works). It is almost as if you have to learn each Latin compound as its own new work, but in Greek you can guess and wind up close to the mark. The other nice thing about Greek is that it is a bit more promiscuous about noun-noun compounds. Latin does this to an extent with words like crucifer (cross bearer), but it usually prefers to phrase things like that as a phrase—typically with genitive case.

Greek is far more promiscuous with compounds, particularly in the right- vs. left-headedness of the compound. You're familiar with some of them already. Here are a few left-headed compounds.

ῥινό.κερως – rhinoceros (nose.horn)
ἱππο.πόταμος – hippopotamus (horse.river)
φιλο.σοφία – philosophy (love.knowledge)

You may not know my new favorite from Lucian, which is right-headed.

ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archers

Rebecca Black Friday

So I was tooling around with the phonetics tool from the University of Iowa, and realized something. There is a sound of American English not represented. And I'm not talking about some limited regionalism or a phoneme pronounced by a small or low-status group. No, I'm talking about a sound that normal people use, by which I mean myself. Where is the glottal stop? Why no love?

There is this other language I know. I tend to call it /læʔIn/ in English. I can't think of anyone else off hand who pronounces it this way, but it feels really natural to me so I must've picked it up somewhere. I know I've heard /lædIn/, which kind of sounds weird. And I can think of several people off-hand who say /lætIn/, and they always seem to accent the second syllable unlike the other two pronunciations. It just sounds strange, but I've never said anything about it until right here. But anyway. I say this because I want to underline the validity of ʔ as a standard American English sound. Out of my mouth, even Robert Pattinson becomes Robert Paʔinson.

Of course the highest profile user of the glottal stop in American English is none other than Rebecca Black. She tells us she's "giʔn down on Friday." So with that, why aren't you /gɪʔn/ down already? It's Friday.